Archives (Blogger)

March 18, 2008

This blog is now defunct and I will soon be deleting it from Typepad. I have archived it at frankmcgahon.com/internetcommentator. I may return to commentary blogging at some stage in the future but I think I'll leave Internet Commentator as it was rather than attempt to continue it.

October 17, 2006

Sort of following on from the post below: I knew that the Brazil football team were very popular in Japan, but I didn't realise that Brazil hosts the largest Japanese community outside Japan which numbers around 3 million, (compare to the Japanese-American population of 800,000 or so).

October 16, 2006

John Fay at Irish Eagle mentions a letter to the editor of the Miami Herald which pointed out that Portuguese-speaking nations such as Brazilians, for example, weren't "Hispanic". In the course of noting that this was the reason for popular use of the more inclusive term "Latino", it occurred to me that while it would be reasonable to infer that the latter term embraces speakers of all Latin tongues, in practice, it refers exclusively to speakers of Spanish and Portuguese.

The island of Hispaniola contains two countries: Haiti and The Dominican Republic, the former Francophone, the latter Spanish-speaking. So far as I can tell Dominicans are, like their fellow Caribbeans from Cuba, considered to be Latinos, while those from the western half of the island, like other French-speaking Caribbeans, aren't.

October 11, 2006

I was listening to Green party TD Ciarán Cuffe on Today FM a few weeks ago trying to make the case for Carbon taxes. His case was weakened by his attempt to weasel around the issue of precisely who would be hit by an addition Carbon tax. Despite the cliché, it isn't really possible to hit two birds with the one stone and one major difficulty a leftist environmental party like the Irish Greens are going to have is the fact that Pigovian taxes are not always going to neatly align with taxes aimed at redistributing wealth.

The purpose of a Carbon tax (assuming that the problem I identified below is somehow addressed) is to correct for the fact that the "costs" of emitting carbon dioxide are not internalised - these costs are spread and don't depend on level of use - and therefore provide no incentive to cut back. The only Carbon tax which will work is one which is blind to other considerations and applied equally. It's either meant to tackle carbon or not. The climate doesn't know whether emissions come from an SUV, a Jet plane, an industrial plant in India or some old lady's clapped out diesel boiler.

There is this popular view that the rich and powerful are the greatest "polluters", but what if they weren't? There is no direct relationship between pollution and wealth and no particular reason to believe that the rich emit more than the poor. What if the rich young man in his well insulated home is responsible for considerably less emissions than an elderly woman in a poorly insulated home with that clapped out diesel boiler? The Carbon tax, to work properly, must "punish" her more than him. This is a conclusion the Greens would prefer to shy away from, but there are always going to be cases where the interests of the environment are opposed to the interests of "social justice", and they are going to have to decide whether they are primarily a leftist party or an environmentalist party.

Poor old Canute. In apparently seeking merely to demonstrate to sycophantic courtiers the limits of his powers he has been remembered for an act of preposterous hubris: ordering the waves to retreat. The proper lesson from this tale ought not be that one cannot hold the sea at bay. The sea can indeed be held at bay by Dikes or Levees, otherwise Holland, for example, wouldn't exist. One key feature of a dike is that it is an all or nothing solution. It would be an act of pointlessness equivalent to the popular version of Canute's command to build half a dike - the sea would simply engulf it around the incomplete portion.

Imagine a curved bay, subject to coastal erosion, composed of adjoining strips of property perpendicular to the shore. Let's say there are 50 landowners and a majority agree that coastal erosion is a bad thing and a proper solution to the problem would be to build a sea wall, the entire length of the bay with each landowner responsible for his or her own portion. As I note above, the sea wall is all or nothing. The landowners who do build their walls might as well take the money it cost to build them put it in a big oil drum and burn it for all the good it would do, if the remainder don't also complete their walls.

A sea wall is an expensive bit of construction, let's say some landowners are poorer than the others and have more pressing needs than building a seawall and, further, rely on the eroded coast for fishing. It's not much consolation as you lie starving to know that in the future the full extent of your land will be protected from the sea. We could also posit that there are other landowners who are rich enough to afford the wall but aren't sufficiently bothered by the rate of coastal erosion to spend the money on the wall, perhaps they plan to incorporate a marina in the portion of their land projected to be engulfed.

It should be clear that the only way that coastal erosion may be forestalled in this scenario is a) for there to be unanimous agreement that this is a good thing and worth the cost and b) for the wall to be continuous and complete. There is no point in one "virtuous" landowner "setting an example" to his peers by constructing his wall ahead of schedule - even if he does manage to convince a large number of landowners to follow his example - nor is there any point in excusing poorer landowners from building the wall. It either gets built or it doesn't and, if it doesn't get built, any effort or expense on construction of a partial wall is a) a waste of money and b) distracts from adjusting to the eventuality of coastal erosion, particularly by engendering a false sense of "doing something".

Even assuming everything that is said by activists about the cause of climate change is correct, it's still going to be a mistake to follow their policy prescriptions unless and until there is a) consensus agreement that this is desirable and worth the cost and b) some method to ensure full compliance by everyone. I see no evidence for a) or b).

[Edit: based on a comment from Jon below, posit that the proposed sea wall is a line of defence a bit out into the sea rather than on or behind the current high water mark]

October 06, 2006

Picked up a couple of gongs at the Louth Design & Conservation Awards last night. There was some stiff competition (including O'Donnell & Toumey's RIAI award winning house at Chapel Pass) in the category of Best New House in a Town or Village - given the location of those that made the shortlist it could have been retitled Best New House in Blackrock - but we managed to scoop both the winner and the highly commended in this category for, respectively, John McGahon's house at Hamilton Drive and Oona Kenny's house at the Ferns.

October 04, 2006

I mentioned below that I had come across a piece referencing an old post of mine at Samizdata on why architects might lean left. I had intended to comment on the post but it seems as if registration is required so I began to compose an email, which turned into something reasonably post-worthy and considering this blog has been starved of content for quite a while now I thought I'd put it up:

Jason (having incorrectly labelled me as a "libertarian conservative" and tendentiously described Samizdata as "right wing web site") in response to my conclusion - "Architects are planners. [...]there is little that the architect imagines cannot be planned. If you can design a house, you can design furniture for that house or the city in which that house is located, so goes the thinking. If a chair, a house, a city, why not an economy?" - writes:

Of course, design is fundamentally about problem solving and problem solving is not a traditional concern of those of a conservative bent. In the last century at least, the main political battle was over the issue of preserving continuity with the past versus constructing a better future.

I think he has misinterpreted my point and I fear that the conflations of "right wing", "conservative" and "Libertarian" on one hand and "liberal" and "left wing" on the other hand are leading him astray.

The first thing is that while conservatism is indeed about preserving continuity, that isn't really the case for libertarians/liberals (using the latter term correctly). One of the most influential liberal thinkers Hayek addressed this very issue as early as 1960 in his essay "Why I am not a conservative"

Let me now state what seems to me the decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed by its resistance to current tendencies in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments. But, though there is a need for a "brake on the vehicle of progress,"[3] I personally cannot be content with simply helping to apply the brake. What the liberal must ask, first of all, is not how fast or how far we should move, but where we should move. In fact, he differs much more from the collectivist radical of today than does the conservative. While the last generally holds merely a mild and moderate version of the prejudices of his time, the liberal today must more positively oppose some of the basic conceptions which most conservatives share with the socialists.

The second thing is that liberalism and left wing are not the same and that a commitment to freedom of speech/expression, tolerance for diverse others, strident individualism etc. does not require an equivalent commitment to, say, a planned economy or extensive government intervention in all sorts of interactions between people. Indeed the traditional liberal argument is that a commitment to the former is incompatible with a commitment to the latter. The reason is that it simply isn't possible to implement the type of programs required by the left wing, social democrat without interfering with, and preventing many of the voluntary interactions entailed by freedom of expression, strident individualism etc. The standard response to this is to try and carve a distinction between social and economic interactions. The problem is that these distinctions evaporate on close inspection. Take, for example a series of voluntary interactions:

1. Paying a prostitute/escort for sex
2. Buying drugs
3. Paying someone in cash for a nixer
4. Smoking in a bar by consent of the owner and all patrons
5. Arranging for risk-based health insurance
6. Agreeing to work for nothing - voluntary work
7. Agreeing to work for a rate below the minimum wage
8. Engaging in sex acts proscribed by the state.
9. Hiring/working for someone born in a different jurisdiction

Assume that in each case, no coercion or fraud is involved and that each party is fully consenting and happy with the interaction. The simple liberal argument is that so long as there are no "externalities", and no third parties harmed by such interactions, the government has no business interfering in such voluntary interactions. Now, it may well be the case that for many of these, there are externalities, and third parties harmed by such exchanges. But if so, a soi-disant liberal is compelled to make the case for such externalities. In my experience, most soi-disant "liberals" do not make that case but instead argue that the greater good is served by such interference. That is, that there is no externality, but rather, the common good requires government intervention. This is a position incompatible with liberalism and provides a justification for all the type of reactionary conservative restrictions rightly abhorred by liberals and "liberals", such as sodomy laws and restrictions on freedom of expression.

As to his interpretation of my point. The idea is not that there is anything wrong with "problem solving" but the instead the insight is that "planning" and "problem solving" are not the same thing and as it happens, central "planning" is a pretty poor way of solving problems. The "problem" of designing almost anything is best left to individuals in the market. There is no Department of Computing which specifies and designs computers to be used by everyone. It oughtn't be too difficult to imagine how such computers would compare with the ones we actually use today.

The point I was trying to make is that designers like to plan everything they are involved with and casually, unthinkingly, assume that this can be scaled up to an entire economy. The problem is that a given economy is unimaginably complex and there is no central body which could possibly process the vast amount of information embodied in the price system. This, again, was another insight of Hayek's explained in his essay "The use of knowledge in society" in 1945

We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function—a function which, of course, it fulfils less perfectly as prices grow more rigid. (Even when quoted prices have become quite rigid, however, the forces which would operate through changes in price still operate to a considerable extent through changes in the other terms of the contract.) The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.

This is why central planning has never worked in practice and why, I think, designers oughtn't to scale up their instinct to plan above that which they are actually designing.

It's not something I do that often, but some ennui-inspired auto-googling unearthed a few oddities for me:

1. Someone has uploaded a few of my dj mixes from my mixes blog, and gone to the trouble of pasting a (not hugely flattering by the way) photo of me, presumably elicited from google image search, (taken by Bernie Goldbach in the Market Bar in 2004 while I was communicating something to Dick O'Brien), copied the bio from my mixes blog and put it all together here.

3. Jason at Digit, refers to an old piece of mine at Samizdata (of which, more anon)

4. My recent 32 Tune mix has also been picked up by a Drum and Bass forum in Bulgaria, complete with added cover art, a House music blog in Bosnia, and on Freshout Media with photo of vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson added.

September 14, 2006

It's Ireland in September 2006 and you are a self-employed driver in an open market. There's a stack of unavoidable, ever-increasing bills on your hall floor - EazyPass, road tax, insurance and an eye-watering invoice for fuel - and you know that every single one of your competitors/colleagues have to suck this up, too. Appealing to the regulator for a break is pointless and your client base will never accede to a demand for a steep rise in the cost of your hire. The end of your rope is in sight, so what does your trade association cry out for: traffic blockades, lobbying TDs, strikes? Not so much, no. Those heirs of Larkin and Connolly in the taxi business could learn so much about positive PR from their comrades in the forty-footers.

September 11, 2006

I've never been too impressed with the Oirish Daily Mail but this particular op-ed about how awful things are in contemporary Ireland plumbed new depths of reactionary conservatism:

You don’t need me to tell you that Ireland has changed significantly over the last ten years and that among the changes wrought has been higher density living. As apartment complexes have risen up and spread across our urban geography, we find ourselves living at closer quarters for longer, especially as we watch bijou artisans cottages with postage stamp gardens and reasonable postal codes disappear rapidly over the horizon of affordability. Tensions are inevitable.

[...]

Perhaps you’re living next to a flat which the Department of Social and Family Affairs has inveigled an unscupulous or, worse, innocent dupe of a landlord to fill with tracksuit-wearing howayas whose daily toil it is to smoke crack until all hours of the morning, interminably listening to a looped Aslan EP at deafening volume while their “burds” top up the household income with a little light prostitution. And your life is a Dantean purgatory.

In an increasingly urbanised and high-density Ireland, noise disputes are becoming more and more prevalent. And serious. Apart from the stress and nauseating worry which can result, what are the chances that the fifth time in as many nights that you pop down the corridor to have a word with those Latvian young fellas about the all-night techno parties which are keeping your wife and new-born child in a state of constant, mewling wakefulness, especially your wife, you’ll be bringing along your baseball bat?

August 31, 2006

In the southern hemisphere, it's spring. That's the only possible explanation I have for the news that Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano, two of Argentina's best performers at the World cup and teammates at Corinthians in Brazil (not to mention two who would adorn Manchester United, Arsenal or even Chelsea) are set for Upton Park, apparently on a season long loan. Scratch that, it's a "permanent" deal. Yeah right. Until Chelsea assess how effective the pair are in the premiership. Look out for their transfers across London next summer, or even as early as January.

August 25, 2006

Just got back from two weeks holiday in Lagos, Portugal (not to be confused with Lagos, Nigeria!). I didn't announce my departure this time partly because I hadn't posted much/at all in the preceding week and partly because there's now sufficient personal information here on my weblog for the enterprising burglar to find and empty my house during the promised period of absence.

Over at Foreign Dispatches a couple of weeks ago, to a post on camera recommendations, I commented that someone who was interested in a single piece of light equipment for snapshots might, rather than purchase a camera, do well to trade their current phone for the Sony Ericsson k750i which features a 2mp camera - sufficient resolution for display on a 1600 x 1200 high res computer monitor, which is where, I'd guess, the vast majority of quotidian digital photographs are ever shown. I made the mistake of choosing a Motorola V3 over the k750i back in January and after much frustration finally reversed that decision a few weeks ago and have become quite evangelical about this phone, far superior to the V3 even setting aside its camera function.

So, I thought I'd put my money where my mouth is and use it (my wife's Ixus had finally given up the ghost, so she took my Fuji Finepix Z2) for the holiday snaps:

Abiola suggests that one can determine much of a society's merits by its attitudes towards extranational dating:

I believe one can tell a great deal about the true nature of a society by the way its men behave upon seeing or hearing of "outsiders" (however defined) becomeing involved with "their" women: do they find it a matter of no great interest and keep going about their business, or does each and every instance of an outsider openly cavorting with female members of the in-group set the local gutter press on the trail for blood?

This put me in mind of a popular advertising campaign here in the 1980s for Kerrygold butter which featured an Irish woman bringing her French paramour home to meet the parents. Their initial suspicion gave way to an invite for dinner, in preparation of which the gallant Gallic gentleman offered "Ees zer sumsink I can elp?"

August 03, 2006

My favorite conspiracy theory is the one that says the world is being run by a handful of ultra-rich capitalists, and that our elected governments are mere puppets. I sure hope it’s true. Otherwise my survival depends on hordes of clueless goobers electing competent leaders. That’s about as likely as a dog pissing the Mona Lisa into a snow bank.

The only way I can get to sleep at night is by imagining a secret cabal of highly competent puppetmasters who are handling the important decisions while our elected politicians debate flag burning and the definition of marriage.

[...]

I know some of you will say that it’s obvious that corporate money influences the government. But that’s not enough to make me feel comfortable. I want to know there’s an actual meeting of the puppetmasters every Thursday at 3 pm...

July 27, 2006

It's been a miserable summer for United fans. Few of our players performed well at the World cup and one of those wants to leave. David Gill rashly promised to try and complete all transfer business before the tournament and yet, not a single player has arrived. Spurs are haggling over the sale of Michael Carrick, a gifted midfielder but one whose addition to the squad doesn't so much solve an existing problem - the absence of a defensive/box to box midfielder - as create a new one - although he is considered to be a defensive midfielder, he is more of a deep-lying playmaker who rarely tackles, a kind of Geordie Pirlo. "El Niño", Fernando Torres announces that he is to stay at Atletico for another year after months of feverish, although mostly Spanish, speculation that he was Old-Trafford-bound. Normally, I take speculation with a pinch of salt, especially from the likes of the Mirror, but with such slim pickings these days, I'm going to hope and pray that they've fluked onto the truth this time in claiming that United are negotating the transfer of Javier Mascherano. The Argentine, plying his trade at Corinthians in Brazil, was outstanding at Germany and has all the attributes United need in midfield: an excellent tackler, basically holds the midfield together to provide a platform for Riquelme, but he is also a skilful passer and shows great energy and commitment - an Heinze in the engine room - and is still only 22. This is a transfer I could get excited about.

I was called at 5am to re-site a cannula in a patient who has no veins left anywhere – except the side of her foot where she can’t reach to inject – so I spend ages putting it in for her urgent antibiotics – at 10am I walk by – see security removing a man from the ward – turns out he’s the boyfriend, he brought her in heroin – she shot up through MY line in the toilet and then proceeded to have rather noisy intercourse with him in same eerily blue lit toilet before being interrupted by security.

July 26, 2006

We were neutral because we could afford to be. Because other countries would have sent their young people off to die to defend our culture and our way of life. Because we were on the far flung end of Europe, and if the Soviets made it that far we'd have no chance anyway. We did it because we are selfish and cowardly.

If you are walking on the street and you see someone being mugged you might turn a blind eye . You might decide not to intervene because you don't like violence. Because you're a pacifist. Because it's not your problem and you're not on the receiving end. Really whatever rationality you wrap your decision in you are just trying to avoid the thought that you do it because you are afraid and would rather be a coward. Ultimately this is the same as when we proclaim ourselves as "neutral" and brag about the policy, when in reality we should be ashamed of our position.

By the way: Kip Esquire patiently explains why it wouldn't have mattered if Al Gore had won the popular vote, even though he probably didn't:

This is, of course, utter nonsense. Al Gore did not win the popular vote -- the outcome of the popular vote will never be known, since many places with undisputed polling place victories never counted their absentee ballots or their disputed votes (what today we call "provisional ballots"). And let's not forget the "snowbird voter" fraud in Florida that almost allowed Gore to steal the 2000 election from Bush.

Far more to the point -- why should make it any difference if Al Gore did indeed win the popular vote? The candidates did not wage a popular vote campaign -- they waged an Electoral College campaign. The popular vote was, therefore, wholly irrelevant.

How would the vote have played out if the Electoral College had not existed and a popular vote was in place from the outset? Who knows? The candidates would have traveled differently, spent their money differently, postured and positioned themselves differently. And so on.

It would be akin to saying that, even though Player A won the tennis match, Player B made fewer unforced errors. So what? They weren't having an "unforced error" contest; they were having a tennis match. So too with presidential elections -- you can't "win" or "lose" a contest that was never fought.